Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is...
When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...
As I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, any enterprise VDI deployment needs redundant broker services for high availability. Other enterprise applications such as Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint can all benefit from a load balancer, be it virtual or physical. Building on yesterday's post about configuring SSL on the NetScaler, it's...
A high availability VDI deployment, such as XenDesktop 5, demands that you use multiple servers to provide broker redundancy. As such, a load balancer such as the Citrix Netscaler comes in mighty handy. The NetScaler can also act as an ICA proxy between a trusted and untrusted network, such as the internet...
According to Citrix, the number one mistake people make when deploying VDI is not sizing their storage properly for performance. However, calculating a target IOPS for your environment is far from easy and you really need to understand VDI, its unique workloads, and your storage subsystem. There are many blogs...
During the testing process of Citrix XenDesktop 5, we were using the built-in SQL express database so we can do a quick lab setup. Of course a production deployment would use a full blown SQL 2008 R2 enterprise edition instance with database mirroring. During the XenDesktop 5 SP1 upgrade process,...
A couple of weeks ago Citrix released XenDesktop 5.0 SP1, which fixes a number of bugs. Last week I attended Citrix Synergy 2011, and talked to an employee about SP1. He said that the service pack fixes many more bugs than the short list included in the release notes. In...
In XenDesktop 5.0 you can configure HDX policies to block or allow certain types of USB devices. For example, you could block flash drives but allow USB printers or webcams. Unfortunately, Citrix doesn't give you an easy to to discover class IDs, vendor IDs, or other identifiers that can be...
During my testing of Citrix XenDesktop 5 I ran across yet another bug, which set me back in my testing. Apparently if the VM template that you want machine creation services (MCS) to use has been configured with the VMware pvscsi controller, creating the VMs will fail when you generate a...